Life & Wisdom Quote by Edward Abbey

Abbey’s line lands like a grin with a knife behind it: the “savages” aren’t the people being evangelized, but the project doing the evangelizing. By flipping the expected danger, he turns missionary work from moral rescue into a kind of cultural arson. The joke isn’t soft; it’s an accusation dressed as a punchline.

The intent is to puncture the self-congratulating story that empire tells about itself. “Go forth” echoes biblical cadence and church rhetoric, the language of righteous motion, of destiny with clean hands. Abbey keeps that familiar music, then detunes it with “as if,” a phrase that signals impatience with the premise itself. The subtext: conversion is rarely just about souls. It’s about discipline, paperwork, borders, property, labor. It arrives with schools, laws, and a new hierarchy that calls itself salvation.

Calling the targets “savages” is deliberate bait. Abbey isn’t endorsing the slur; he’s exposing it as a tool. Once you label a people savage, any intervention can be framed as improvement, even when it’s theft or eradication in Sunday clothes. The twist - that Christianizing makes them “dangerous” - points to what missionary work historically carried alongside its hymns: the soft power that precedes hard power, the cultural reset that makes later domination easier and resistance easier to criminalize.

Written in the late 20th century by a fierce anti-authoritarian environmental writer, the line also reads as a Western self-critique: the “civilized” world’s most lethal export isn’t guns or germs, but certainty.